Dr. Brendan Dunford:

I thank Deputy Devlin for the question. It is much appreciated. He raised two good points around flexibility and bureaucracy. In many of our protected landscapes, there are many barriers to a farmer farming. Permission must be secured for this, that and the other and it is beyond many people to farm. One of the greatest services we offer to our farmers in the Burren is not just the payment but taking care of that bureaucratic workload. This is what I mean by designing our programmes around the needs of the farmer. None of us likes doing paperwork but for farmers it is a death sentence and a real deterrent. We have taken that whole bureaucratic workload away from them so they can get on and do what they are best at, which is farming and delivering the ecosystem services we want. That is really important, including at local level.

The second point is around flexibility. When we think about a scheme farmers love and enjoy, the money will be important but the freedom to farm is absolutely critical. Farmers hate being told what to do. We had the discussion before about how different parts of the country are different. Every farmer is different and even the fields within a farm are different. We need to create a programme which allows different forms of management to take place on different fields within different farms to deliver different outcomes. The only way to do that is through this results-based approach whereby the farmer is told what we want and what we will pay for from a field and he or she can go ahead and innovate to deliver that. That is one of the key principles of the Burren programme.

The Deputy spoke about scaling the programme, it effectively has been scaled from 200 to 2,000 farmers across Ireland who are now involved in result-based payments. It is the principles that we are scaling. These are the principle of partnership between the farmer and the scientist, the principle of keeping it local and addressing local issues and challenges and the principle of paying the farmer for what he or she delivers. There is no problem in the Deputy, as a legislator, enabling that to happen. The mechanism is already there to enable that flexibility. It is about deciding what outcomes we want, putting a price on them, putting a local structure in place to support the delivery of that outcome and letting farmers at it. They are more than capable of delivering. My message to the Deputy is one of reassurance that this can be done and is being done and we just need to get on and do more of it now.